In his memoir, the author recalls the boy he loved while growing up in Jordan – and weaves the tale with his family’s history of dispossession
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even decades after Tareq Baconi’s grandmother fled in terror from the port city of Haifa, carrying a Bible, a crucifix and a week’s worth of clothes, he followed her directions to the family home a few blocks from the sea.
The building was still standing, almost as she had left it in 1948, instantly familiar from childhood stories. Standing beside his husband, Baconi could not bring himself to ring the bell, to find out who was living in the rooms that held Eva’s childhood memories.
“I want to imagine it empty, loyal, waiting for our return. I want it to exist outside of time, as if everything stopped that April,” he writes in his memoir. Simply finding the house was the physical connection he sought between her past and his inheritance of memories. “I have finally bent time, held her history in my present.”
